Geoffrey Hinton, the man affectionately nicknamed the “godfather of AI,” has spent years warning the world that AI could one day spell humanity’s doom.
But in a twist even he probably didn’t see coming, AI recently came for his love life before it came for civilization.
In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Hinton revealed that his girlfriend broke up with him using none other than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“She got ChatGPT to tell me what a rat I was,” he admitted.
Apparently, she fed the bot details of his supposed misbehavior, then handed him the AI-generated breakup essay.
Hinton, who insists he didn’t actually act like a rat, took it in stride: “It didn’t make me feel too bad.”
Turns out, using AI for breakups isn’t all that unusual.
Plenty of people are outsourcing emotionally messy conversations to chatbots, because nothing says closure like a machine-generated paragraph about why “it’s not you, it’s the algorithm.”
Hinton himself is no stranger to life-changing AI moments. He pioneered neural networks back in the 1980s, work that later earned him a Nobel Prize in Physics and a long stint at Google before he left in 2023.
Now 77, he’s a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and still very much in the game, raising alarms about AI’s future.
His worries? That superintelligent AI could arrive within five to 20 years, destabilizing jobs and enriching only a tiny slice of society.
He argues that the problem isn’t the tech itself but the capitalist system that will funnel AI’s profits upward.
His proposed solution: build AI that treats humanity with “maternal instincts” because who better to protect us than a superintelligent, all-knowing mom-bot?
Still, even the AI pioneer admits the future is unpredictable: it could be “amazingly good” or “amazingly bad.”
For now, though, Hinton seems optimistic on at least one front: he’s found a new partner. Hopefully, this one won’t outsource relationship drama to ChatGPT.
Is it concerning that people are increasingly using AI to handle difficult personal conversations like breakups, or is this just another tool for communication? Do you think Geoffrey Hinton’s warnings about AI’s societal impact are more credible given his personal experience with how AI is already changing human relationships? Tell us below in the comments, or reach us via our Twitter or Facebook.
